Abstract

In this paper, we examine the metaphilosophical relevance of the phenomenon of sleep, suggesting that it has the potential to not only enrich the analysis of limit cases but also to test some of the ideas concerning the possibility of natu- ralizing phenomenology and its limits. Insofar as sleeping allows for both a first personal and a third personal description and challenges the usual primacy of the first-person point of view, exploring sleeping under the prism of its import for the phenomenological method allows to illuminate the relationships be- tween a first personal transcendental phenomenology and a third personal nat- uralized one. We do this by examining Husserl’s treatment of sleep as a limit- case, and the problem of accounting for deep sleep from a first-personal per- spective. Drawing from a Heidegger-inspired account of sleep, we argue that sleepdemandsforatypeofapproachthatcanbe fairlydescribedasontological, and which reveals a new understanding of subjectivity as a dynamic unity of dif- ferent modes of being. Although this approach challenges a first-personal based approach, it does not, however support the naturalization of phenome- nology or undermine the project of a transcendental philosophy of experience.